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  • Muckraker #9

    I guess 23 years on, we’re probably well past the point where we might routinely encounter a thick, glossy-cover, free improvisation / experimental / noise mag with a CD inside of it at Tower Records, aren’t we? Muckraker #9 came out in Summer 2000 and was a pretty fetching and decently-distributed publication pulled together with some regularity throughout the 90s by Patrick Marley – always on the deep edge of obscurity, while always approachable enough to bring in purportedly open-minded experimental skeptics such as myself.

    I mean, Muckraker #9 is literally packed with so many deep and likely semi-listenable obscurities I really can’t grasp a ton of it; it’s music I haven’t heard and perhaps never will hear, and that’s probably okay. Much of the reviewed tapes and CD-Rs and lathe-cut singles are not findable even today, though you never know what’ll turn up at Fusetron that might have been sitting there for 23 years. Muckraker often skirts the boundaries of what TQ fanzine once called “the no fans underground” – music so formless and vague that it’s often comfortable assuming that it’s being directed toward a listening audience of zero. Still, I’m excited to see so many great, fanzine-funding ads for labels with deep weirdo catalogs that I missed or barely comprehended at the time – labels like Squealer, Little Army, High Knee, Chocolate Monk, Freedom From, Polyamory, Menlo Park, Povertech Industries and many, many more. 

    The biggest draw for me here has always been the interview with Nick Schultz of Majora Records by Gretchen Gonzales. It was such a phenomenal and wide-ranging talk with one of our nation’s leading and most cantankerous lights that I reprinted it in Dynamite Hemorrhage #5, then interviewed Nick myself as an addendum to it. Majora was an exceptionally special 1990s label, and one that we risk forgetting to our undying shame. This is followed by a piece with Nick and Alan Bishop of the Sun City Girls bantering about Eddy Detroit, telling stories about this longtime Phoenix-area musical enigma, mostly because Marley and the Muckraker team couldn’t actually pin down Eddy Detroit himself for a talk. 

    Some hallowed forerunners of the no-fans underground are interviewed as well, both Derek Bailey and then Eddie Prevost of AMM. Prevost is the exact opposite of pompous and obtuse; he tells stories of early AMM shows in 1966 where promoters wouldn’t pay them for their completed sets because they were “only tuning up”. There’s another interview with Ceramic Hobs, a group I’m most familiar with due to the forthrightness of the principles about their mental illness, institutionalizations and so forth. Simon Morris of the band calls the music he makes about his psychosis “the last frontier”. It might be, but does it burn down the house? Does it totally kick out the fucking jams? You’ll have to tell us.

    I always liked that Patrick Marley went on to thrive in a true journalism career – like, he’s a major stringer for The Washington Post these days. He and the Muckraker team proved to me back then both here and in previous issues that you can make anything musical (or non-musical) interesting enough if you ask the right questions, write intelligently, respect your audience and do the hard work of explaining the validity and context of the music you’re talking about.

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  • Brain Damage #1

    We had a post a couple of days ago about the annus horribilis of 1974, so let’s return there again today and talk about a “real” early-years music fanzine, Brain Damage #1, and a great, albeit insular, one at that. This comes courtesy of a xerox my friend JB made for me of it in the early 1990s, as he magnanimously did with the Back Door Man issue we once discussed here. Talk about heavy hitters: the editors are Metal Mike Saunders (much later of Vom and the Angry Samoans) and Gene Sculatti, and the publisher is Mark Shipper (Chris Stigliano went deep on his 1972 fanzine Flash, which put forth multiple issues, here). 

    Brain Damage #1 was a one-and-done parody fanzine, “formerly called Who Took The Shelves”. I’m sure it was all quite uproarious for the creators, and if you’ve got something of a historical sense of fanzines like Who Put The Bomp, magazines like Creem, and the general rock critic milieu of the early 1970s, much of the mirth-making taking place here might even make some sense to a contemporary audience. They say “Subscriptions are $56 for 240 issues in the United States and Canada. Overseas rates do not exist and we reserve the right to refuse all requests from Limeys, Polacks, and New Yorkers.” They start with fake letters from Lester Bangs, Robot Hull, John Fogerty and Jon Landau, all very funny to the editors I’m sure, and continue on with a phony Lester Bangs interview and a heavy metal records consumer guide from “Bobby Crisco” aka Robert Christgau. There are some chortles and guffaws to be had, yet no splitting of sides.

    Then there’s a first-rate, over-the-top piece about basketball hero Meadowlark Lemon of the Harlem Globetrotters and his (very real) “Shoot-a-Basket” 45, compared extremely favorably with the Stooges, the Shadows of Knight, Love and early Pink Floyd. James Williamson is rumored to be the guitarist on it. I think I’d better check that one out. There’s an extensive “Juke Box Jury” by Reg Shaw, aka Greg Shaw, complete with the same font and layout he was using in his own fanzine. And then, quite unexpectedly, there’s a real guide to Lou Reed’s early pre-Velvets Pickwick 45s by Wayne Davis, not really played for laughs but more some gentle mocking of his work with The Beachnuts and so forth.

    Now even in the course of all this tomfoolery there are many uses of the term “punk rock”, once again resting the case that the term was something very much in circulation well before 1976 – at least in rarefied rock-crit circles – and that it was used to describe exactly what you think it was. As of this writing, there’s a copy of Brain Damage #1 for sale on eBay for the low low price of $199.99, but it does contain some photos of the pages if you’d like to take a peek.

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  • My Teeth Need Attention #2

    Joe Tunis, a.k.a. “CarbonJoe”, is already back in action with a second digest-sized issue of My Teeth Need Attention as we hoped and prayed for back when we reviewed his first one earlier this year. Not only has his game been upped this time around with an absolutely lovely hue of orange/red for the cover – I believe this may have been the same shade as the “Fire Engine Red” crayon in my 64-color childhood Crayola box – but he’s got a terrific interview with another one of the 21st century’s best music fanzine creators, Matthias Andersson of Fŏrdämning. 

    Because Fŏrdämning wasn’t exactly easy to come by when it was around in the United States of America, or outside of Sweden at all, you may better know Andersson for his i Dischi Del Barone, Discreet Music, Fŏrdämning Archiv and Förlag För Fri Musik labels, all of which are still active. He’s also a member of numerous experimental musical acts on said labels, the most “famous” of whom are Enhet För Fri Musik, who are very, very famous and who routinely sell out hockey rinks in their native Sweden. This interview conducted by Tunis is the most complete overview I’ve seen of how this incessant curator and furtherer of the underground came to be the man he is today. If I can be said to have modern heroes, Andersson is probably one of mine and it’s always great to hear from someone who got into rad punk and underground sounds from Bones Brigade skate videos, especially when they lived in a 400-person village in Southern Sweden.

    My Teeth Need Attention #2 has a similarly deep philosophical investigation with New Zealand musician and label owner Anthony Milton, who relates that he nearly recently died from a brain hemorrhage, wracking me with guilt over the callousness of this blog’s name. Liam Grant, one of the finest solo guitarists on the planet right now and who has a new LP on Carbon Records as it turns out, contributes a few pages of tour photos. Then there’s a record-collector-adjacent piece of fiction and another about a bewildering encounter with a male prostitute; another tour diary from Joe just like last issue; and it closes off with a gaggle of reviews, a few of which have led me by the hand into “exciting new dimensions in music” like this wild 1970s Pygmy Unit private-press jazz thing.

    An excellent 2023 fanzine made on real paper! You can grab a copy here.

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  • Beetle (October 1974)

    I get it – we’re really stretching the concept of “fanzine” here, as this is a full-fledged rock magazine from 1974, something found on what we once called the newsstand. Perhaps at the grocery store magazine rack. If it’s any consolation, I won’t be tackling any Creem, Circus or Hit Parader here – but the Canadian publication Beetle gives me an excuse to talk about Roxy Music, and I’m always happy to converse about Roxy Music.

    Maybe we ought to get a handle on Beetle first, though. While you can find plenty of back issues for sale on eBay, I’m not really coming up with much about it on the broader world wide web, so we’ll have to go with what we have here, the only issue owned by Fanzine Hemorrhage. It’s October 1974 – widely and quite rightly considered one of the proverbial low points in rock n roll history. There are features on Chuck Mangione, a young and not-yet-famous Billy Joel and Brownsville Station (“Smokin’ in the Boy’s Room” – one of the first rock songs I ever heard). There are excited reviews of The Bee Gees, Earth Wind & Fire and Chicago, whose singer is pictured wearing a Black Hawks jersey. Original six, baby!

    Yet there is quality music worth paying attention to, and at least someone at Beetle knows about it. Apparently the New York Dolls took a beating in the most recent issue, and the letters section roundly takes them to task for it. They review Too Much Too Soon and call it “truly fine raunch”, which I guess in hindsight seems a little off, because that record was some serious “sophomore slump” if there ever was such a thing, right? While the staff at Beetle gripe in several places about the Canadian content laws that mean that their radio stations are clogged with Canadian rock garbage, they are homers to some extent: “Mahogany Rush, a heavy Hendrixian trio from Montreal, are soon to be one of the better known Canadian bands in the U.S. So how come they’re unheard of in Canada?”

    This reminds me of the time I was reading the morning newspaper when I was on a work trip in Toronto, the day after the academy awards. There were two screaming headlines on the front page – one about the winner of that year’s Best Picture, and an even larger one in which there was a big story about Canadian Sarah Polley not winning “Best Adapted Screenplay”. I can understand it, though. I’ve always been part of the all-encompassing American monoculture that swallows everything, and it was nice to maybe see things from the perspective of someone from Flin Flon or Moose Jaw.

    Speaking of film, there’s a laudatory long review of Peter Bogdonovich’s Daisy Miller, which is something that was “quite rare” in those days. But what excites me the most here is the big piece on Roxy Music, including a strange interview with Bryan Ferry that’s threaded in. When I was still obsessively listening to Casey Kasem’s American Top 40 in the mid/late 1970s, I heard a show he did, more like a half-day special, in which he played a ton of the previous hits of the 1970s. I had just become acquainted with “Love is the Drug” around that time, and loved it, but had never heard anything else from Roxy – and Casey Kasem, of all people, busted out “The Thrill of It All” on this program. Life changer.

    I immediately bought Roxy Music’s Greatest Hits, this 1977 American album you see here that never really got repressed in the US or UK afterward – this was probably 1980. I played that thing to death, and honestly even now I think it’s a perfect record. Culling the best of Roxy Music into one LP, and actually choosing the best is no easy feat, even if it doesn’t contain “Remake/Remodel” or “In Every Dream Home a Heartache”. But it also doesn’t have any of that Flesh and Blood or Avalon crap, and I was really glad when I heard that stuff that I’d started here.

    I was also kind of blown away when Casey played “The Thrill of It All” on an American Top 40 special. My impression at the time was that no one cared about Roxy Music in the USA at all, and that they had been more or less an underground band (granted, I was 12 years old at the time so I didn’t know anything about anything). Beetle, and obviously plenty of other extant rock music writing I’ve subsequently seen, showed that this was not really the case; there was a strong contingent of Roxy fans in the US; they were played on both AM hit radio and FM rock radio; and people did go to their shows here (and in Canada). They were just more beloved in their native England, unlike Mahogany Rush in their native Canada, I guess.

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  • Forced Exposure #15

    (Originally written as part of a Forced Exposure fanzine overview in Dynamite Hemorrhage #7):

    When Byron Coley was interviewed by Jason Gross online in 2010, he told a pretty funny story about how Diamanda Galas came to be on the cover of this Summer 1989 issue:

    The (interview) we were dreading the most was the Diamanda Galas one. The problem with doing a print magazine is that sometimes, records come out and it’s like… you really don’t have enough time to deal with (them), but you want to deal with it ’cause it’s on a label like Mute. So a Diamanda Galas record came in right when the issue was due and I think Jimmie reviewed it. His whole review was something like… she was supposedly going out with Blixa (Bargeld) right then, so Jimmie wrote something like “Blixa’s dick must be as big as everybody says it is because she’s really fucking screaming on this one.” (laughs) And she kind of hit the roof because at that time, a lot of people were reading the magazine and a review like that… People would just really laugh. The label put across the word that she was furious about it. And I absolutely understand. So we said “OK, we’ll interview her. We’ll put her on the cover of the next issue.” It seemed like a good idea anyway.

    But getting ready to go down for that interview… We interviewed her at a restaurant in Hell’s Kitchen. We were just like “Oh my God, she’s going to fucking castrate us.” So we went in and her rep was really vicious and we had done tons of research, so we went in prepared to be disembowel. And we apologized and explained the situation, but she was really hostile. But then as it went along and she hummed a Coltrane tune and Jimmie knew what it was (it was something theme from Meditations) and she was like “Oh!” And the questions we had were obviously well-researched – we asked her about a lot of stuff that people hadn’t really talked to her about. So it ended up being OK but that was a rough one.

    She actually comes off in the interview like a pretentious, self-involved and utterly pompous ass, but whatever. I saw her finally in the mid-1990s, and it will always be one of the most memorable shows of my lifetime.

    The letters section starts off with a nice bit of what we’d now recognize as “trolling” from an ex- professional baseball pitcher named Lowell Palmer, who shares the advice of “the original punk Vince Lombardi” to “do sports, not drugs”. Byron naturally takes the bait and yammers about how real adults take drugs, or, in his words, “gobble a sheet of L or bang a little smack”. Just how old were these FE guys by 1989? I’m afraid you don’t wanna know. It certainly wasn’t 19 or 20.

    This issue has some fantastic material otherwise. Seymour Glass did an exceptionally comprehensive & entertaining interview with the Sun City Girls, which was followed by a single- page paean to Claw Hammer – who were fast becoming my favorite band at the time – by Eddie Flowers; “LA hasn’t been home to a ROCK combo this musically exciting and aesthetically gone since, uh, the early, Kendra-era Dream Syndicate”. Ditto that, Crawlin’ Ed.

    More terrific photos of leading lights like Death of Samantha and Hanatarash and Howe Gelb litter the excellent record reviews section, and the return of the C/U Meter sees three singles get a “C/U ENTIRE PRESSING”: Vertigo’s first one (agree 100%), plus Lithium X-Mas and White Stains (both of which I’ve found online, like, just now – and both are terrific & weird psych records). Huge books section, loads of video reviews, and a new mostly noir/crime review section called “Chris D.’s Video Library” – which was a healthy step forward from the previous issue’s father/son porn reviews.

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  • Flipside #31

    History was made with this April 1982 issue of Flipside, at least in my world. My older, clued-in cousin had it and let me peruse it frequently, mostly to laugh at The Misfits interview and to ogle Tracy Lea from Red Cross, my ultimate punk rock girl crush for many years. It struck a major chord for me because this one came out right at the tip-top of “peak LA hardcore” – peak US hardcore, pretty much – and it reads accordingly, in all of its stupidity, squalor, excitement and chaotic splendor. In fact, its tiny type truly packs in an entire universe of slam-your-ass-off punk rock mania, written for teens by people who weren’t teens, yet who wrote as intelligently as any dim-bulb high school simpleton from Canoga Park or Hawthorne or La Mirada might.

    Lest you think I come here to bury Flipside #31, let it be said that I do not! I tried to capture my general feeling about the fanzine when I wrote about the issue that’d come out right after this one here. This one’s even better, for many reasons, mostly for how on-the-ground it all is, documenting the scene at eye level and in the words of its jackbooted and bandanna’ed participants. A nicely representative letter from Mark Evans gets us started:

    Hey Flipside: I’m from the SF area and I’m 14 years old and I go to all the shows I can in S.F. We have some good shows up here like just a while ago Fear played with Circle One and some other bands from around here like Fuck Up’s, Lewd Crucifix and Domino Theory. Up here our Vex is the Elite Club, we have shows about every two weeks it’s totally cool. I want to say another thing: you probably have heard about the Mabuhay Gardens where they have shows every night, it sucks all they have is new wave shows, it sucks total big dick!!! — Mark Evans PS: Print this so I can show my mommy

    On the opposite page is another fine missive about the scene from one “Falling” James Moreland of the Leaving Trains; I’ve done you the favor of scanning it in its entirety at the end of this post. Boy did I have some interesting run-ins with that guy over the years. There was the time in the late 80s when I tried bantering with him at a show at the Coconut Teazer (!) in LA, and he was aggressively licking his lips and jittering. I was like, oh, so that’s what speed does to you. A few years later I watched him get kicked out of Al’s Bar in LA at his own show, then later eavesdropped on him having an intense argument with Taquila Mockingbird in the parking lot. Soon enough he’d show up all around LA in dresses, yammering incessantly, and my understanding is gender fluidity has been a part of who he is ever since. There’s a “Dead or Alive?” page up for him here. I’m very glad he’s still with us: an American original.

    So – the Misfits article. Now I do enjoy The Misfits myself, at least the pre-Walk Among Us 45s. But I don’t need to tell you what a horrible human being Glenn Danzig was. I don’t know about now. My cousin and I – who were huge Flesh Eaters fans – used to get a real kick out of this part of the interview:

    Flipside: And you and Chris D. mixed the album. Weren’t you supposed to play with Chris D.’s band the Flesheaters?

    Glenn: Yeah, but they’re scared of us.

    Flipside: Why’s that?

    Glenn: I don’t know…maybe because we’re all (make a mean scary face gesture) and they’re all homos, ya know?!! I don’t care what they like, I hate them. God this is homo city around here!!

    Jerry: We try to avoid going down that street (Santa Monica Blvd. near Starwood).

    Glenn: You go to the supermarket or to use the phone and it’s so yeecch (makes kissing sound), “Fuck you, leave me alone for 5 seconds!!” In N.Y. it’s not like that. Everybody is into their own trip. No one bugs you, if you’re a homo, fine, you are a homo and go where homo’s go. But here it’s so fucked up, everybody’s pushing on you. You have a lot more homos here than in New York!!

    Flipside: Well, right here is where they all concentrate…

    Glenn: And Frisco is fucking homo land!! Yeah we wanted to eat at McDonald’s and the Flesheaters wanted to go into homo-ville, we just said, “fuck you, you give us the money, we’re getting out of here!!”. 

    You sometimes forget from the vantage point of 2023 just how rabidly anti-gay the youth of America were forty years ago. I was in high school then, and I remember. The letters section of Flipside #31 is just “fag”, “homo”, “that’s gay”, “I hate that queer”, etc., ad nauseam. HR, in the interview with the Bad Brains, responds to the question “How’d it go in SF?” with, “Well, it’s ok, but too many faggots.” Back to The Misfits – their interview here took place after their infamous San Francisco show at the Elite Club, during which “Doyle” totally brained some kid in the crowd with his guitar. (The incident is very well-described here). That show is reviewed in this issue, and ends a little shakily, “We figured someone might have been murdered but I haven’t read anything about it in the paper.”

    So aside from all that, there’s a nice interview with Pagan Icons-era Saccharine Trust, who are already tiring of punk and moving on to what they’d become one album later; Tracy Lea and the always reliably hilarious Red Cross; Jodie Foster’s Army reveal the origins of the song title “Beach Blanket Bongout”, quite seriously among the top five song titles of all time as voted by Fanzine Hemorrhage; and a plethora of tiny-type scene reports mostly written by morons, which are yet Illuminative of a pretty special and unique time in the American underground. It’s an insanely-packed issue that all criticisms aside was highly worth the dollar my cousin spent on it in the HC Spring of 1982.

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  • Writer’s Block #7

    We’re now traveling backward in time through multiple fanzines that were helmed and penned by Mike Applestein. We talked about his current Silent Command fanzine here; we then conversed about his late 90s fanzine Caught In Flux here. We’re now discussing Writer’s Block #7, which came out in the Spring of 1991 and was published from Spotswood, New Jersey along with his girlfriend Alex Kogan and an all-female cast of contributing editors, including Jen Matson. You can see from the scan that my copy was marked up 5x from its original price, having recently procured it as I did from Division Leap books & ephemera.

    The Writer’s Block crew are primarily rooted in underground pop music of many flavors and colors, the more lo-fi and personal the better. There’s room for the broader, noisier underground as well, and Thinking Fellers Union Local 282 and Killdozer make lauded appearances, but in general, acts like Heavenly and Unrest and The Clean rule the roost, as well as New Zealand and the Flying Nun universe. There’s an interview with the unfortunately-named Olympia, WA duo Courtney Love – I always felt sorry for them on that count – as well as with Sue Garner, who was in the Shams and Fish & Roses, and who’d later go on to be in the highly underrated (including by me, at the time) Run On. The passion and deep knowledge that went into their interview subjects and the questions asked of them is readily apparent, and no question Writer’s Block belongs in the international pop underground museum someone’ll eventually erect. 

    Barbara Manning writes a letter from San Francisco, and Applestein reviews her 2/23/91 show at the Knitting Factory in NYC, her first show in town since World of Pooh blew through a year previous as they were breaking up. Man, that year – 1991 – I must have seen Barbara Manning play a dozen or more shows in the San Francisco Bay Area alone. I was besotted with World of Pooh while they were around, and was bereft now that they were gone. Manning’s solo shows and early shows with “Barbara Manning and the Tablespoons” were a fantastic salve. Her work in the first half of the 90s stands up proudly vs. anyone’s. Great to see another magazine enthusiastically making said case in real time. 

    Pavement get one of their first local shows reviewed – the 8/12/90 show at Maxwell’s – and it’s clear from Alex Kogan’s review that they were barely more coherent then than they were the time I saw them at their big San Francisco coming-out party a few months before that. I can’t find anything online to confirm exactly when the band first played in SF, but it was a big deal for several of us based on their two 45s and the Perfect Sound Forever record, and….they were horrific! Like walk-out-long-before-the-end-of-the-set horrific. Kogan blames intoxication and a who-cares attitude. The 1990s, folks. That’s how we rolled. I never saw Pavement on a stage again.

    (By the way – there is reliable evidence online that suggests that Pavement might not have actually played their first San Francisco show until 1992. This would not be the first time that my misshapen memory has arranged events to fit a narrative I’d like to convey; in this case, my attendance at a 1990 show by Pavement before anyone else saw them play. Not that I care about Pavement, you know, but I do prefer being accurate to muddled and braggy. Anyone know?)

    My copy of Writer’s Block #7 has stamps and a mailing label slapped on the back, and it’s addressed to Steve Connell from Puncture fanzine. I wonder how Mike Applestein feels about Connell having turned his back like this on his 1991 sweat, toil and labor.

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  • Termbo #1

    Remember when the Terminal Boredom guys did a print zine? Aside from three collections of internet reprints, I had thought that Termbo #1 in 2013 was the only one they did, but even as I’m writing this, I just found out that there was another three years later that I never saw. Then they were done. Now their message board’s totally kaput as well. I can’t say I really did anything over there, maybe a post or two, but a lot of their online action was concurrent with a lot of my online action, and I had much respect for the community of frothing, opinionated-as-hell garage punk misanthropes they built, as well as for the gentlemen who built it, primarily Rich Kroneiss and a few other hearty, regular contributors.

    If you had to try and pinpoint their aesthetic, this fanzine’s cover provides many clues. A messed-up looking “beach wrestler”; a muscular heavy metal arm with a knife; and a band called “White Load”. (Forget the “poetry”; you certainly will once you read it). Today’s Total Punk record label is an almost perfect manifestation of the world that Terminal Boredom helped to incubate and further along. Termbo #1 states its mission pretty clearly from the off: “…a collection of articles and interviews, most of which were written for this print edition in particular and some older material that never made it to the Termbo site for whatever reason.”

    Of those articles, there is one that stands out very clearly for me. Russ Murphy digs deep into the Black Flag debacle that had gone on that year, the one where Greg Ginn brought Ron Reyes back into the fold for a “Black Flag” record and tour, pretty much just to spite the shenanigans Keith Morris was pulling with his own bands Off! and Flag. I’m not totally sure of the chronology of all this stuff, because I really tried my hardest to not pay attention to any of it, but when this record cover came out it was truly a “drop everything” moment. Murphy illuminates the contours of the controversy and attempts a journey into Ginn’s head to understand what possessed him to do any of this, and as a card-carrying Black Flag freak, tries really hard to enjoy the record (“Careful listening shows that there is more going on here than a casual listen will reveal”). He comes to the conclusion that in order to actually listen to and get something out of this record, the listener will really have to “put some effort” into it. I can imagine – but no thanks! Great piece.

    Also enjoyed the film reviews by Jordy Shearer, which range from “Cabin Boy” to “Frances Ha” to Antonioni’s “The Passenger” and back again to “Phantasm”. There’s also a long piece about exploitation films – I think it’s by Kroneiss, but it’s uncredited – and the hallowed video stores and VHS tapes of his misspent youth. There’s an interview with the aforementioned White Load and a photo in which one of the guys has a fuckin’ sword. Totally killer. And another with the FNU Ronnies, who were a pretty wild experimental punk band I think I may need to listen to again.

    If you want to know where all the “message board punks” went after the death of Terminal Boredom – or if you do know – this thread’s where you need to head next after subscribing to future Fanzine Hemorrhage posts in the upper right-hand corner of our desktop site.

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  • Deep Water #5

    The late 1990s were the heyday of “brothers going their own way” when it came to underground, rock-adjacent music – as least as it was covered by fanzines at the time. I’ve already yammered about how averse to free jazz, abstract folk and experimental noise I was at the time in my previous discussions of Tuba Frenzy #4, Astronauts #4 and Gold Soundz #4, so I won’t belabor the unimportant point here, nor the unimportant point that I’ve come whimpering back to it all in the subsequent decades. Just be glad I don’t have any issues of De/Create or Opprobrium. Those were the ones that really pissed me off back then.

    This brings us to Deep Water #5 from Winter 1998, which emanates from the same genus as those others.  You see a fanzine published from Iowa City, Iowa and there’s a pretty good chance that someone’s going to college. In fact the mailing address is on “College Street”. There are three editors, and I’m a bit suspicious of their listed names: “Kevin Moist”, “Bill Reader” and “Chris Curley” – though I suppose if Reader and Curley were going for something wacky they’d have done a little better than that.

    The fanzine begins inauspiciously. There’s a long article from a pal of theirs, an American in Poland, haranguing the music fanzine reader (who after all, just wants to ROCK) about Poland’s inelegant post-Communist transition to democracy and hyper-capitalism in the 1990s. It smells like a ploy by the writer to get published in the only place he might be able to – his friends’ budget music fanzine. He probably bugged the crap out of them to shoehorn this dreary drone in there. That said, there are recipes in the magazine – like recipes you cook, for food – so maybe Deep Water was attempting an omnivorous approach to culture as they themselves defined it.

    There’s nowhere to go but up from there – and thankfully they go way up! Kevin Moist’s intro to his Brother J.T. interview is exceptionally well-written. Now I know he was a college boy. Just a well-done interview through and through – like one of the better wide-ranging fanzine discussions with a smart person you’ll ever read; if you’ve ever read a good Dan Melchior interview, it’s the same vibe – and now I’m feeling like I need to go back and listen to more Brother J.T. records. I mostly started and ended in the 80s with “she’s just fourteen and I don’t care!”. The same thing happened to me when I read the long piece on Cordelia’s Dad – another erudite exploration that makes me wonder how I missed this band. Good music writing’ll do that, and is all too rare. And how did I forgot all about Grimble Grumble until today??

    Honestly, maybe I’m most taken with the Times New Roman font, always the font of choice for my own mags. I know I ask for details sometimes on these obscure mags and it’s been very rare that anyone’s been willing and able to provide it, but: does anyone know anything more about Deep Water and the fellas that put it out? (I found this, so that’s a good start). You leave a comment about it if you do, and fifty years from now some middle-aged dude that hasn’t been born yet will totally thank you.

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  • Who Put The Bomp! #14

    Who Put The Bomp was an ur-fanzine, one of the earlier and absolute best examples of a rocknroll fanatic following his obsessions and documenting every jot and titter from his heroes. Greg Shaw is deservedly lauded for parting from the mainstream in his writing when it was warranted; for going deep into topics that no one else would touch (like this issue’s instrumental surf records coverage) and for bringing on a king’s table of rock writers over the years to write for the mag – including Lester Bangs, Richard Meltzer, Dave Marsh, Greil Marcus and “Metal” Mike Saunders.

    I’ve had all six of the late 70s punk-infused issues, from when it was just called Bomp! magazine, for quite some time. I’m only now coming around to trying to cobble together issues of the pre-1976 Who Put The Bomp! fanzine, of which there are 15 issues. The first one of those I got was the “British Invasion Issue”, #10-11, and it’s so massive and meaty and full of tiny type that I’ve barely cracked the code on the thing. All-in, it’s longer than most books about music you’re likely to read. All the issues before that one are too scarce and expensive for Fanzine Hemorrhage’s pocketbook, but if there’s a will there’s a way, and there’s totally a will. 

    So I’m concentrating on those issues between that British Invasion one and and the punk-era stuff, and recently found a lovely copy of Who Put The Bomp! #14 from Fall 1975, the one with these hodads on the cover. Like I said, the key to the issue is the instrumental surf music discography and backstory. It’s an incredible resource even now, 48 years later. I’m sure there’s probably some small-press record collector book that’d tell me a bunch of the same info I can get here, but there might not be. I happen to love this stuff and it grows on me even more as I age into the typical age bracket of the “1961 surf instrumental 45 record collector”. After glomming onto this thing I’ve been spending a bunch of time with the Surf-Age Nuggets: Trash & Twang Instrumentals box set, as well as with my Lost Legends of Surf Guitar comps. OK, grandpa!

    I learned all about Tony Hilder, who produced Fresno’s Revels (who did “Church Key”) and was a prime mover in the early 60s California Central Valley instrumental surf scene, which I was surprised as you were to find out was a thing. Hilder then put out a series of “right-wing records” about the John Birch society and Barry Goldwater, which I’m sure are total fucking godhead. Alas, the piece says “The defeat of Barry Goldwater and the demise of surf music marked the end of Tony Hilder’s active involvement in the music industry. He is now employed as a salesman of freeze-dried food products in Southern California, writing reactionary declarations in his spare time”. 

    Other highlights: a complete discography and story about Dutch rock (The Outsiders, Q65, Shocking Blue etc.) and another oddly compelling discography of Beatles novelties and parodies – none of it by the Beatles, but stuff like The Twiliters’ “My Beatle Haircut”. I mean, the folks that put this stuff together, need I say, did not have the internet, or Goldmine, or anything similar. Just their own crate-digging and obsessive compiling, at a time when a used, non-picture sleeve 45 in a record store could be picked up for a nickel, dime or quarter.

    And Roky Erickson is back! He’s just been released from a Texas state psychiatric hospital after being inside for five years – and he’s got a new band, Roky Erickson & Bleib Alien. He’s come to Los Angeles to play his brand-new songs, “Two-Headed Dog”, “Starry Eyes”, “Don’t Slander Me” and “Don’t Shake Me Lucifer”. Can you believe it? Greg Turner is on the scene, and gets Erickson to do a fairly coherent interview. This is then followed up with a full International Artists discography, because of course it is. 

    The new wave is almost here. Shaw notes in his end-of-issue column that “Big news around Hollywood is The Runaways, a group of 3 high school girls (14, 16, 18) who play like The Sweet and sing great teenage anthems, most of them written by Kerry Krome, a 13-year-old girl prodigy. They also do The Troggs’ classic “Come Now”. Remember, you read it here first.” In 1975, that was probably the case. She was actually Kari Krome, real name Carrie Mitchell, and boy does she now have a sordid and likely indisputable story to tell.

    Who Put The Bomp #14 is one of those fanzines you wanna hold onto for dear life, not merely because of its centrality to a certain all-encompassing rock & roll mindset in ‘75, but as a resource to be frequently mined. I probably gave Shaw short shrift in my twenties for being what his contributors Greg Turner and Mike Saunders would call “a power pop turd”, but hey, I’ve even come around a little on some 70s power pop. Let me see if I can find a few of those other issues and I promise to meet ya here to talk about them.

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